The Burial Theme: Trans-Matter Port & Objects

The work was commissioned by the Institute for Sound & Music (ISM) for the group exhibition “Hexadome” in Berlin, and consisted of an audiovisual collaboration between Constanza Bizraelli and Berlin-based visual artist, Michael Tan. The immersive experience took place within a metallic structure that held a system of 52 speakers and 6 screens. Constanza Bizraelli created the sound piece and the sound spatialisation design, and Michael Tan created the visual part of the work. The piece was premiered at the Martin Groupius-Bau Museum in Berlin along pieces by acclaimed artists such as Brian Eno, Holly Herndon and more.

Concept

Inspired by ancient Moche iconography, the work explores the concept of dualism through a cosmological lens, unveiling ancestral narratives to approach dualities such as life and death and cycles of generation and destruction, and how these dualities appear as planes that are constantly transposed onto one another.

For the Moches, the context of ritual and ceremonial practices created spaces of liminality where the boundaries of these dual aspects of existence would blur.  Through their religious practices there was particular emphasis put on the ceremonial object (such as vessels and other type of containers.) Following this line of thought, The Burial Theme: Trans-Matter Port & Objects” explores the ceremonial object in its native archeological context, as an “unearthed object,” expressing its connection with deep time and transience, and also in its purely ceremonial context.  

The work is particularly inspired by a mythic scene found in Moche iconography and titled “The Burial Theme”. The scene narrates the burial of priestess/empress and depics the interesectionality between the world of the living and the world of the dead through mythological pictoric elements from Moche’s religious culture. 

Sound Spatialisation & Residency at the ZKM

Prior to the premier of the piece, Constanza Bizraelli spent 3 weeks at a residency at the ZKM in Karlsruhe where she received a training in sound spatialization techniques and here she developed the spatial sound design for the installation. The original composition was created for a system of 52 channels and spatialised utilising the Zirconium software.

During 2019, The Hexadome project went on a North-American Tour. “The Burial Theme: Trans-Matter Port & Objects” was shown in San Francisco at the Gray Area Festival, at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal as part of the MUTEK Festival, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Massachussets.

In 2020 the Institute for Sound & Music (ISM) released a compilation of the sound works comissioned for the Installation on a limited vinyl edition. The release features eight live installations from the ISM Hexadome, recorded in binaural sound at MASS MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Massachusetts) in December 2019.

Listening to the recordings on headphones recreates the detailed sense of spatialisation and movement of the ISM Hexadome's immersive 52-channel sound system that these works were exclusively composed for. The album also includes artwork prints of 10 still images excerpted from the installations created by visual artists in collaboration with the sound artist.